Job advertisements edged up again in April, marking a year of consecutive monthly increases, according to a leading survey.
The ANZ survey showed newspaper and internet job ads rose by one per cent during the month, and 20.5 per cent year-on-year.
Internet ads rose 1.2 per cent, while newspaper job ads fell 3.4 per cent as the trend towards online advertising continued.
“Recent trends in job advertising exhibit a distinct resources/two-speed economy nature,” ANZ head of Australian economics and property research Ivan Colhoun said.
“Advertising has slowed in NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT, and broadly strengthened in Queensland (in spite of the floods) and the NT.
“In WA, advertising has slowed a little in recent months from very strong rates of growth in the second half of 2010 and early 2011, but remains above national average growth rates,” he said.
The survey found job advertising remained well above the annual long-term growth rate after being depressed in 2009.
While newspaper advertising fell, ANZ said this was due to a combination of elevated figures in the two previous months following the Queensland floods, and the timing of the Easter and Anzac day holidays. It said this had led to some overstatement of the weakness in the April newspaper data.
ANZ said it expects a slight decline in employment of 5,000 when the Australian Bureau of Statistics releases April employment data on Thursday, while predicting the unemployment rate would remain unchanged at 4.9 per cent.
“There will be considerable interest in any measures announced by the government in Tuesday’s Budget to accommodate the labour demands of the mining sector and to retrain and re-skill workers displaced by the current significant sectoral adjustment in the Australian economy,” Mr Colhoun said.
source: businessspectator.com.au
